mistwist

From mis- +‎ twist.

mistwist (third-person singular simple present mistwists, present participle mistwisting, simple past and past participle mistwisted)

1. To twist incorrectly or by mistake.
   • 1907, United States Tobacco Journal - Volume 68, page 4:

     And as for the amelioration of the revenue in consonance with the changed and up to date conditions of the trade the Bureau has never been known to be guilty of any ideas in that direction with the possible exception of mistwisting the statutes to oppress the trade and hinder its development.

   • 1911, David A. Curtis, Old Man Greenhut and His Friends, page 287:

     "The boys is all het up over the way they've been did in the game," he muttered, "an' if I was to butt in they'd likely mistwist my meanin'. […] "

   • 1958, Atkinson's Evening Post and Philadelphia Saturday News, page 96:

     It is somehow reassuring to know that the machines can make mistakes—they mistwist, or drop, or otherwise foul up about five pretzels in every hundred.

mistwist (plural mistwists)

1. An instance of mistwisting.
   • 1906 March, Alexander Hume Ford, “How the All-Seeing-Eye (Mechanical) is Made”, in New Age Magazine, volume 4, number 3, page 245:

     There is a great square box in which glass that has been spoiled is cast aside, worthless through the single mistwist of a wrist perhaps, or perhaps a flaw is started in the early stages of transformation, that is not discovered until many dollars worth of work has been done upon the little square piece of glass that first came into the factory.

   • 1987, Martin E. Marty, A Short History of Christianity, page 127:

     To Pelagius, a personally irreproachable man according to what little view of him emerges from the shadows of personal obscurity, "sin" was not a basic mistwist in the human character. It represented momentary, isolated, individual acts of willful evil.

   • 2003, Philip Julian Runkel, People as Living Things: The Psychology of Perceptual Control, page 169:

     Walking and driving seem to be examples of muscular movement toward a goal in which a misstep or mistwist occurs once in millions or billions of instances.

   • 2014, Nobuo Tanaka, Scanning Transmission Electron Microscopy Of Nanomaterials, page 121:

     The angle of a small-angle grain boundary is generally limited to within ~10-15° mistilt or mistwist, which is close to the overlapping limit of dislocation.

   • 2015, Larry Duberstein, Postcards from Pinsk:

     Once or twice he narrowly missed: the full flavor of sleep was right there on his palate, only to vaporize in a mistwist of the neck or a voice adrift on the ward.